Scorsese on Kubrick: “Watching a Kubrick film is like gazing up at a mountaintop. You look up and wonder, how could anyone have climbed that high? There are emotional passages and images and spaces in his films that have an inexplicable power, with a magnetic force that draws you in slowly, mysteriously: the boy’s rides on his Big Wheel through the endless corridors of the hotel in The Shining; the monumental silence of outer space in 2001: A Space Odyssey; the inhuman pace of the first half of Full Metal Jacket, building up to its logical, murderous conclusion; the grandeur of the war room in Dr. Strangelove, at once scary and comical; the brutal pop future of A Clockwork Orange; the raw intimacy of the exchanges between Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut.

I’m not sure if I can say that I have a favourite Kubrick picture, but somehow I keep coming back to Barry Lyndon. I think that’s because it’s such a profoundly emotional experience. The emotion is conveyed through the movement of the camera, the slowness of the pace, the way the characters move in relation to their surroundings. People didn’t get it when it came out. Many still don’t. Basically, in one exquisitely beautiful image after another, you’re watching the progress of a man as he moves from the purest innocence to the coldest sophistication, ending in absolute bitterness – and it’s all a matter of simple, elemental survival. It’s a terrifying film because all the candlelit beauty is nothing but a veil over the worst cruelty. But it’s real cruelty, the kind you see every day in polite society.

Stanley Kubrick was one of the only modern masters we had, and this final edition of Michel Ciment’s definitive book is an invaluable resource. Personally speaking, I’ve watched and studied Kubrick’s work repeatedly over the years. He was unique in the sense that with each new film he redefined the medium and its possibilities. But he was more than just a technical innovator. Like all visionaries, he spoke the truth. And no matter how comfortable we think we are with the truth, it always comes as a profound shock when we’re forced to meet it face-to-face.”

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